Free image hosting websites – A round up
There are plenty of image hosting sites out there. You need them mainly for posting images to Web forums such as phpBB. The free bandwidth provided by these sites are also increasing all the time. In this post, I will look at some of the best free image hosting Websites. I only consider those sites which allow direct linking.
Flickr! – Yes, this is probably the most widely used service now. There are important terms of use – You are supposed to use it only for personal use and that you must provide a link back to Flickr if the image is hosted on a different site. Also free accounts has a bandwidth limitation of 100MB per month.
Picasa Web Album – Similar to Flickr. The free service provides 250GB of web space.
ImageShack – This is intended for hot linking of images and is quite popular. Allows 100MB of transfer per image for an hour. There is no upload limit.
Photobucket – The free service has a limit on the size of the photo (1024×768). You get 1GB of space and 10GB of total bandwidth per month. If you don’t use your account for 90 days, it gets deleted!
xs.to – If you are looking for quick and dirty image hosting, this is ideal! Allows you to host image instantly without registration. Also allows for hotlinking. Maximum of 500 files per user can be uploaded.
Yeah, I know there are more photo hosting sites. But I think one of the above 5 will suffice. But in case you want to check out more, see the following(I haven’t reviewed all of them!). But I did verify that the sites are up and running! 
Alphabetical list of free image hosting sites
http://app02.bonpoo.com/file.htm
http://www.filehost.to
http://www.fotopic.net
http://www.freeimagelibrary.com
http://www.imagecave.com/
http://www.imageheap.com
http://www.imagevenue.com/
http://www.imagexoom.com
http://www.myimagebuddy.com
http://www.myimagehosting.com
http://www.myonlineimages.com/
http://www.photoserver.us
http://www.picsplace.to
http://www.realimagehost.com
http://www.simpload.com
http://www.solisstyle.com/ims/
http://www.thefreeimagehosting.com
http://www.thepicturebin.com
http://www.tinypic.com
http://www.watotron.com/watupload/
http://www.yesalbum.com/
http://www.YourUpload.com (NSFW – damn popups)
Why you should renew your domain name early!
Do you wait till the last minute to renew your domain name? Well, here is a piece of news which will prompt you to renew your domain well in advance. Reuters reported that chinese Web users have lost 10,000 domain names since they were unable to renew it in time. This is was due to the internet disruption caused by earthquakes near Taiwan.
The figure 10,000 looked pretty cooked up to me. It turns out that the news may not true after all.
Liu Ningbo from HiChina Web Solutions Ltd (www.net.cn), China’s largest domain registration service provider, said the losses are only possible in “theory” but not in “reality”.
Internet users are reminded at least a month before their leased domain expires and the domain names are frozen and kept for one or two months after the expiry date, he said.
But anyway I am going to renew my domain well in advance. I don’t want to be the victim of “Act of God”!
List of free desktop blog editors – post directly from desktop!
I use w.bloggar to post to this blog. This desktop tool allows me to update my blog fast, without logging onto the wordpress console. The only problem is that w.bloggar doesn’t support creation of new categories (which I don’t need very often, but if you are using categories as tags you will find it a problem).
Here is a list of free desktop based blog publishing tools. Most of these atleast support Wordpress and Movable Type platforms. Please note I haven’t included any commercial or trial versions (for example, ecto).
Are you using one of these tools? Please let me know if I have missed out anything.
Free Desktop blogging tools for Windows
- Bleezer
- blogBuddy
- BlogDesk
- BlogED
- JBlogEditor
- IMHO
- Lycos-Qumana
- PowerBlog
- Post2Blog Express
- PostXING
- Qumana
- RocketPost Basic (Remember it is really basic!)
- Semagic
- SharpMT
- Slug
- Tanjunka (no longer available since domain expired!)
- w.bloggar
- Zoundry
Free Desktop blogging tools for Linux
Free Desktop blogging tools for Mac
Adobe Reader security flaw – unlimited bad publicity
The recently discovered Adobe Reader bug allows an attacker to inject JavaScript via a PDF which is hosted on a trusted domain. For example, assume that a user clicks on a link in site A (which is not very trusted) to go to a PDF on site B (which is a trusted site). Site A can inject JavaScript via the PDF link which will appear to be executed from site B! This is possible since additional commands can be sent to Reader when opening a file.
What makes this scary is that there is nothing site B can do to prevent this (of course, other than taking down all PDF documents)! But this flaw appears relatively harmless since only things that can be snooped are the cookies and session data. It won’t be able to format your machine or steal your local files.
Adobe recommends upgrading your Adobe Reader to version 8 to fix this bug. Adobe may not enjoying all the bad publicity it is getting!
How to backup your Gmail mails
Lot of people use Gmail as their primary email address. This means that many will have critical mails stored in Gmail servers. What they don’t realize is that Gmail is still in beta. Chances of permanently loosing your mails from Gmail server is very small, but you never know (especially since it is a beta)! So it is better to backup your Gmail mails somewhere.
To backup mails, you can enable auto forwarding in Gmail and then forward all the mails to an alternate account somewhere else (Yahoo, perhaps?). Now what will you do with your existing mails? Obviously forwarding all of them is going to be time consuming.
That is where POP3 support in Gmail comes for rescue. You can enable POP3 access on Gmail account and then download all your mails to a desktop email client (I use Outlook Express). You can then backup the mail file created on a CD.
Step 1 – Enable POP3 on Gmail
Step 2 – Configure your mail client to download from Gmail
Please see this comprehensive configuration settings tutorial from Google. Google has also provided an auto configuration tool for Outlook Express.
Following are the important details about Gmail POP3 access,
10 Free chess playing software downloads for PC
Looking for free chess software to play chess? Well you have come to right page. In this article I will cover all the major free chess programs available for PC. Please note that I haven’t included any demo or limited version chess programs even if it is free. Also very old chess programs(which are no longer maintained) are also excluded. May be I write another post for them.
Some of these programs are chess engines which will work with third party chess GUI software such as Xboard.
1. Xboard and WinBoard – These are graphical user interfaces for chess engines. They don’t have any built in intelligence but offers an API for displaying and moving pieces on a chess board. Chess engines such as GNU chess can use these as the front end.
2. GNU Chess – This is one of the oldest free chess game available. It was written for Linux operating system and later ported to other platforms. You can download the Windows version here.
3. Brutal Chess – Brutal Chess is an open source chess engine and is targeted for multiple operating systems. It was developed recently and is still in the alpha stage. Brutal Chess features full 3D graphics, an advanced particle engine, and several different levels of intelligent AI. You download source code or a binary version for Windows here.
4. Crafty – Crafty is a chess program written by Robert Hyatt. Source code also is available. You can download crafty from here.
5. ChessV – ChessV is an open-source Universal Chess program with graphical user-interface, sophisticated AI, support for opening books, and other features of traditional Chess programs. You can download windows version of ChessV here.
6. Arasan Chess – Arasan is a free chess program for Windows and Linux. Arasan has Windows GUI but can also work with Arena or Winboard GUI softwares. Arasan also has huge opening book of about 75,000 moves! You can download arasanchess here.
7. Alpha Chess 3 – It is a compact and free chess game for Windows. Board and chess pieces can be customized and the program includes 5 built in themes. Works on Windows 98+. You can download alphachess here.
8. Lord of the Chess – This is free chess program with a clean interface. You can download lord of the chess here.
9. Jester – This is a free Java based online program. This means that there is no need to download anything! You can directly play the game by visiting here. You can also download (128KB) it here.
10. Der Bringer – This is a chess program written by Gerritt Reubold. You can freely download Der Bringer and use it. Der Bringer works in Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP. It has an ELO rating of about 2150.
If you know of any good free chess playing software not included in this list, please do let me know. I plan to keep this list updated regularly.
What is a sitemap and why it is important?
What are sitemaps?
Sitemaps are a standard way of informing search engines about your site content. Sitemaps facilitates and speeds up search engine crawling of your site. This means that new content on your site will appear pretty quick on the search engine results.
Sitemap is nothing but a simple XML file which lists URLs on your site. It also includes URL meta data such as the date when it was changed, frequency of change and how important the content is for your site.
Till last year, there were different specifications for sitemaps. But now there is only one specification supported by Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. At last they agreed on something! Following a sample sitemap XML.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
How do I create a sitemap for my site?
If you are hosting account with a webhost then you can use Google’s sitemap generator. Please note that this requires Python support on your webhost and you should be able to run Python scripts on it. Google also gives a list of other sitemap generators.
If you are using a blogging tool I suggest you use the plugins that are available. This ensures that as soon as you post a new entry, sitemap is updated and Google is notified about the change. On my Wordpress installations I use Arne Brachhold’s Google sitemap generator for Wordpress which offers hassle free generation of sitemap.
There are a couple of online sitemap generators which can generate a sitemap for an existing website. But most of these free versions have a limit of 500 URLs.
Sitemap restrictions
A single sitemap should not be more than 10MB and is limited by a maximum of of 50,000 URLs. If your sitemap file is more than 10MB, you should break up it into multiple sitemaps and then provide a sitemap index file which lists the sitemap files.
Sitemap tips
Every time a search engine is informed of a change in sitemap in your site, it will download the entire XML. Hence for large sites you should compress the sitemap to a zip file.
You can submit your sitemaps to Google and Yahoo. Both these services require you to sign up. I prefer Google webmaster services since it offers additional features such as page ranking of your URLs. Following is how this site appears on google sitemaps,
References
Sitemaps official site
Google sitemap generator
Arne Brachhold’s Google sitemap generator for Wordpress
“hi im mohan i am having problems” – A spammer without life?
I saw this as the 10th most searched term on technorati and looked up “hi im mohan i am having problems” on google and it returned over 352,000 results!
I guess this spammer is based out of India and seems to have done a really neat job in spamming a lot of Websites! He seems to spam for all subjects from airline tickets to prescription drugs.
He didn’t even spare this anti-spam blog! From the post,
SPAM: hi im mohan i am having problems.
(I would say you do have problems – there’s no cure for stupidity)
IP: 194.165.130.93
All three point to a pay-per-click redirect page. Hence the reason he wants to spam..
His email address is nearly always an “@mail.com” address. Easy enough to stop… You know, Akismet works pretty well if you allow it to – and teach it along the way with what spam it misses…
But what surprised me was that lot of these spam messages have no content at all!
Creating fake identity for web signups
Many times when you visit Web sites and try to register you find that signup process requires a valid US postal address or a credit card number. You may not have a US address or may not want to take the risk of exposing your credit card number. Now there is a solution! You can use the Fake Name Generator!
This service currently supports 17 countries and can generate names based on ethnicity! It also generates random credit card numbers (which doesn’t exist, but syntactically correct) and can even generate US social security numbers! This site also supports creation of bulk data (test data for websites).
Following is a sample generated from the site,
Dennis J. Jones
1469 Swick Hill Street
Kenner, LA 70062
Email Address: Dennis.J.Jones@dodgeit.com
Phone: 985-249-9716
Mother’s maiden name: Howard
Birthday: May 5, 1942
Visa: 4716 2065 1389 5383
Expires: 1/2008
SSN: 435-98-2930
How do I create an Icon for my Web page?
When you visit Web sites in Firefox, you would have noticed that for many sites an Icon is shown on the left side of the URL field (Address field). For example, for Gmail it is a “letter” icon while for Google it is a “big G” icon.
In web speak, this icon is know as the favicon since it appears on the favorites list (in both Internet Explorer and Firefox). Now how do you add such a feature to your own Web page? It is rather simple.
1. First create an icon (name it as favicon.ico) which represents your site. This can be any picture file with dimensions 16 by 16 pixels. You might want to make the background using transparent color, otherwise a white rectangle will appear behind your Icon.
2. Upload your Icon to the document root of your web host. Typically this where your index.html is!
3. Add reference to your icon in all the web pages (inside HEAD tag). For wordpress, the following line can be added to the header.php inside head tags. I think this is not necessary in most browsers.
<link rel="icon" href="http://yoursiteaddress/favicon.ico"></link>Thats it!
Accessing Blocked Websites – Use your own proxy server at home!
It is getting bizzare. Many corporates erroneously blocked Gmail since it got reported as a virus! On top of it, all are busy blocking Orkut and Myspace. I had written a recent piece on accesing banned Websites. Most of the methods mentioned there don’t work in corporate networks since network admins are also getting smart
One of the methods I mentioned was number 8 – Your own proxy server. This is superior to all other methods due to a couple of reasons. First free public proxies are never safe. Your personal and private information can be compromised in these servers. Also these will get blocked by the proxy software eventually. Another reason is that using your own proxy server gives you complete control. You can encrypt your traffic so that no one knows what is being browsed.
I will look at setting up a Http proxy server on a Windows XP machine. Please note that this article won’t be covering the case when you use proxy server or WiFi at home. I will be writing another post about such scenarios later.
Step 1 – Download and install Perl distribution
Download Windows x86 version of Active Perl from ActiveState site. Install with default configuration except the directory which I recommend to be set to “C:\usr\”.
Step 2 – Download and install Apache server
Download latest Apache server for Windows (2.2.3 as of today) from http://httpd.apache.org/. Install it under any folder with port 80 as the HTTP port . Setting port to 80 is important since most corporates only allow port 80 access. If you get any error in binding to port 80, probably you have something else listening on it.
Step 3 – Configure Apache server
Now we need to configure Apache to enable CGI.
Locate #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in httpd.conf (located inside apache subfolder conf) and remove the hash(#) in front.
Locate the “you set DocumentRoot to” string in httpd.conf. Under that you will see Option directive. Change it to Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
Step 4 – Download and install CGIProxy (nph-proxy)
Download CGIProxy (nph-proxy) from http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.cgi.txt. Rename the file to nph-proxy.cgi and copy it to Apache’s document root (htdocs). Now change the first line in nph-proxy.cgi to #!C:\usr\perl\bin\perl.exe
Start Apache from the bin folder (httpd.exe). Now open a browser session and point to http://localhost/nph-proxy.cgi. If everything is ok you should see the following screen.
Find the IP address of your home connection. This can be viewed by typing ipconfig on the command prompt. Now from the office machine access http://IP ADDRESS/. You should see the proxy form which we saw above. Happy orkutting!
Note : This will need more steps if you have a WIFI network at home (port forwarding). I will cover these issues in the next post.
Further Reading
Top 10 ways of accessing banned web sites.
Plaxo – Another Stay connected tool!
I bumped into Plaxo from one of the official mails I got. The mail I got had a rather big signature with the following line, “Add me to your address book… Want a signature like this?” and this was linked to Plaxo.
Plaxo is a service to stay connected with your contacts. If you update your info, all your friends address book also gets updated and vice versa. It can also automatically update outlook address book if outlook integration is enabled.
Following is the Plaxo feature list,
- Update your address book when friends change their contact info
- Update friends?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ address books when your contact info changes
- Sync your contacts, calendar, tasks, notes across Plaxo-enabled applications
- Get reminded of a friend’s birthday just a few days before
- Receive a Plaxo alert whenever a contact?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s info has changed
Plaxo integration with Outlook is pretty neat. Check out the following screenshots of outlook after integration and the useless but jazzy e-mail signature creator.
Plaxo offers a premium service also. The main attaction of the premium service is the ability to send e-cards.
But I am yet to find Plaxo attractive enough (eCards is cool, but only with premium) to sign up!
How to run a digg like site – pligg
Are you looking for a software to run a site like digg? Pligg is a CMS which has digg like features out of the box. Pligg is a free and open source software which requires PHP and MySQL.
Some interesting Pligg features are,
- All the main features are Ajax enabled.?Ç
- Automatic preview of the site linked.
- Color schemes for categories.
- Automatic tag cloud.
- Avatars and Gavatar support.
Unfortunately Pligg (beta8 )?Ç still requires considerable modification before it can be used on a production site. Also pligg is yet to implement email activation, so you will end up fighting spammers or?Ç implementing activation features yourself. On my server, Pligg was damn slow sometimes taking almost 10 seconds for submission!
Check out the Pligg demo?Ç which is based on the latest beta 9!?Ç ?Ç
Further Reading
Download Pligg
How to install Pligg?
Different ways of using Gmail as your backup harddisk – Xmail
Gmail offers more than 2GB of storage space and the limit is increased by almost 3.5MB per day. I am currently using 82 MB (3%) of allotted 2794 MB. Yeah, 82MB is too low and I achieve the low usage by deleting all useless mails. Ever since I started this blog I have been keeping a backup of the site contents (I run 3 websites in total) in a pen drive. Then I thought why don’t I backup the files on Gmail since so much space is free!
Sending a mail to myself everyday became tedious soon. Hence I was looking for tools which could upload files easily instead of going through the Gmail interface. I found two services – Xmail hard drive (which is still in beta) and Gmail drive shell extension. In this post I will look at Xmail harddrive. I will explore Gmail drive shell extension in the next post.
Xmail hard drive offers an online interface to upload and maintain files in a Gmail account. But to be frank I am not confident in entering my Gmail Id and password on a third party account. So I suggest you to get an alternate gmail account if you plan to use Xmail hard drive. Also you never know when Gmail will block this! So use it only as a backup to your backup
Following screenshot shows?Ç the Xmail hard drive interface. Pretty simple, select your file and upload it. For images, it offers thumbnail functionality. As can be seen in the next screenshot, all your files will end up in your inbox and hence one more reason to use an alternate mail id.
Xmail screenshot
Gmail inbox after Xmail usage
?Ç
Google toolbar beta 3 for firefox is out!
Google has released beta 3 of the Firefox Google toolbar. This toolbar requires Firfox 1.5 or above version. It seems that the beta doesn’t work with Firefox 2.0 on Windows XP. I tried installing on two different XP machines without any luck (Yes, I tried the Google suggestions also!). It is quite unbelievable that Google releases something without testing on such a common configuration!
Key new features are,
Custom buttons – You can now add your own custom buttons to the toolbar. A button gallery is also available.
Bookmarks – It is possible to create and save online bookmarks in your Google account. Probably this indicates that stumbleupon/del.icio.us features may be incorporated in future!
Send to feature – Allows you to send Web pages via SMS or email. You can also select a portion of a Web page to send.
Google docs & spreadsheet integration – Drag & drop office files in the toolbar! Also clicking on a link to supported file types will open the Google office tools.
Further Reading
New features in Google toolbar 3 for Firefox
Download Google toolbar 3 for Firefox